(Above, clockwise from top: Admiring a huge and ancient tree; distance markers scrawled on a bench; the official markers, noting correct direction and kilometers left before Santiago; Taking a break in a farmer’s outbuilding. The sign hanging, above, invites pilgrims to rest as long as they keep the area clean and tidy.)

This may be Day 25 or 26 for the hard-core Camino de Santiago pilgrims who started back in France, but for those with less time or a more acute awareness of their physical limitations … it is Day 1.

And the most memorable thing about it?

We made it the 15.4 miles from Sarria to Portomarin. Without aid of car, bus or other wheeled conveyances.

And we are declaring victory … at least for one day, here in northwestern Spain.

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Tomorrow morning, the three of us begin our walk on the Camino de Santiago — the best-known of the Christian pilgrimage trails to Santiago de Compostela, a cathedral city in northwestern Spain.

At the moment, we are in a bustling little town named Sarria, 110 kilometers (68 miles) east of Santiago.

Sarria is the handiest place to begin the abbreviated version of The Way — or El Camino.

The Roman Catholic Church, which for about 13 centuries has encouraged believers to make the pilgrimage to the site of the relics of Saint James (Santiago, in Spanish), does not recognize as a pilgrimage anything shorter than 100km on the camino.

We will get in just over the limit, though 10-11km of clearance seems like more than enough for those who find difficult walking even one mile, or even one kilometer.

We are a bit excited and curious, but also harbor various concerns about whether we can actually walk an average of 14 miles — more than half a marathon — for five consecutive days. We will be aching to find out.

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I can attest to the obvious: A day and a half in Madrid is not nearly enough to get any nuanced sense of Spain’s capital city.

We could have done better. I never have arrived at one of the world’s great cities having done so little preparation. Not much studying of maps or prominent sights, despite none of the three of us having been here before.

Not proud of it. Just worked out that way due to some tight scheduling.

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This week, the National Hockey League announced it will not be taking a month off next season so its players can compete for their national teams in the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.

The first reaction from nearly everyone is … “what an awful decision”.

The NHL’s players joined the Winter Games in 1998, and the past five tournaments presented a chance for the league to be seen by those who might not normally be susceptible to its brutal/elegant charms.

But the NHL is not going along with this one for a variety of reasons, reasons that suggest this is not only about the widely unpopular commissioner Gary Bettman and the team owners.

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Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees was a multiple threat on a ball field. He could hit, hit for power, run, catch, throw — and describe it all in an elegant hand.

I am deeply impressed by the Yankee Clipper’s … penmanship.

In an era when many of us can barely sign our own names, often illegibly, he was an exemplar of what the decently educated mid-20th-century American could do with pen and paper.

How do I know this?

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Yes, I was a Gonzaga partisan, in the NCAA final.

I tend to pull for the West Coast team, if one is available, and Gonzaga qualifies because it plays in the Pacific time zone.

Alas, it a ragged, herky-jerky and poorly officiated game (44 fouls!?!) ended at North Carolina 70, Gonzaga 65 — at about 6:30 a.m. in France.

Thus is extended the region’s NCAA basketball title drought to 20 years, along with the widespread perception that West Coast teams can’t close a deal.

It wasn’t always like that.

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A newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, has announced it is giving up publishing from a fear of its journalists being killed for doing their job.

It certainly gives American journos reason to pause and reflect on the difficulty of putting out the paper in a difficult economic times … and conceding our colleagues in Mexico face much more frightening and deadly situations.

Three journalists were killed — assassinated — in Mexico in the month of March, and a top editor at the paper says

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You didn’t ask, but here are the top 24 players selected in the 35th annual Sun Baseball League draft.

Probably not much different than your league’s results, but we fantasy ballers like to compare and contrast.

And No. 1 …

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We return to the Wayback Machine of NCAA basketball today, recalling two close calls between my journalism self and the Final Four.

It is the one annual sports event I regret never covering in my 40 years in print journalism.

To be sure, there were other big events staged annually that I never covered. The U.S. Open in golf and tennis. The British Open. But I didn’t care about those particularly, then or now.

The Final Four was different, and I came close twice — four decades ago, in my two seasons of covering Division I college basketball.

In both 1978 and 1979, I (and a SoCal team) fell one game short of reaching the Final Four. I don’t know for a fact that I would have traveled to St. Louis (1978) or Salt Lake City (1979) … but if I was covering the Western Regional finals in each of those seasons, and a team we cared about advanced to the Final Four the odds are strong that, yes, I would have gotten that assignment.

Alas.

Let’s review the close calls UCLA and Cal State Fullerton (!) — and I — had in those two years.

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On March 27, 1939, the University of Oregon won the first NCAA basketball championship — actually, the first NCAA team championship of any sort — 46-33 over Ohio State.

That has been mentioned a time or two this week as the Ducks prepare for their Final Four game Saturday with North Carolina — 1939 being the only other time Oregon reached the final four.

Nearly 40 years later, while traveling with the UCLA Bruins on a road trip to Oregon in February of 1979, I had the pleasure of interviewing John H. Dick, the leading scorer (13 points) in the title game and a remarkable man.

We talked about the rigors of a national tournament in an age when railroads were still the primary means of continental travel … as well as how the game had changed and how it had remained the same, in 1979, from what Dick knew in 1939.

Perhaps the biggest surprise I had in the process of learning about a man who, in March of 1939 was a 6-foot-4 junior forward for the Ducks, came to my attention only this week.

To wit:

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